by Jane Haddam
He was just taking off his watch and laying it on the little glass shelf above the toilet when the phone rang again. He grabbed for his robe—he was of a generation that had been taught to be modest even in private—and headed back for the main room, where the Princess phone sat looking ridiculous on an oversize mahogany bedside table. He picked up and said, “Yes?”—causing himself to be immediately subjected to a high excited voice delivering a monologue that was half message and half stream-of-consciousness narrative. He knew that voice and that monologue very well, even though he had heard it for the first time less than half an hour ago. They belonged to Mrs. Edith—Gregor couldn’t remember Mrs. Edith what. He didn’t know if he’d ever known it. He only knew that for the next few days, she was his landlady. He’d never had a better reason to finish a case and finish it fast.
“Oh, Mr. Demarkian,” Edith was screeching. “I’m so glad I found you, you have no idea, I get so nervous being handed these important responsibilities but, of course, that doesn’t matter, I want to do the best I can for the Cardinal, the Cardinal only has to ask and now there’s a visitor for you down in the lobby and I need to know if you’re supposed to see him at all although, of course, I’d think you are, since it’s Father Doherty and Father Doherty—”
Gregor didn’t wait to find out if Father Doherty was a saint or a sinner, the Cardinal’s right-hand man or the local leader of the forces of the Antichrist. It would have taken too much time. He interrupted Edith, told her to ask Father Doherty to wait downstairs for ten or fifteen minutes, and hung up. Then he headed back for the shower.
[2]
For some reason, Gregor had not expected Father Michael Doherty—it was Michael; Edith had managed to get that in at the end—to be a serious man. Maybe he had heard too much the last couple of days about false reports and Brigit sightings, about the localized panic and hysteria that ripples through any small town in the wake of a violent death. Maybe he was still too much a creature of Washington and cities like it, caught in the (false) assumption that real heavyweights do not “bury” themselves in the backwaters. As soon as he saw Michael Doherty, Gregor knew he had a heavyweight. It was all over the man’s face, and especially his eyes. Here was a man who had not only “seen something of the world”—any damn fool could do that for the price of a plane ticket—but who had seen into it. Here was a man Father Tibor Kasparian would like.
Michael Doherty was sitting under an amber- and yellow-shaded, mock-Tiffany reading lamp in an equally mock-leather armchair across from the reception desk, reading a copy of Time. When the elevator doors opened to let Gregor out, he looked up and smiled. Then his smile grew wider, and Gregor understood why at once. Father Michael Doherty was dressed in a pair of twill pants, a button-down shirt left open at the neck to reveal a Roman collar and a good wool sweater. Except for the Roman collar, Gregor was dressed in exactly the same way. It was a style of dress adopted universally by a certain class of American middle-aged male, what Bennis always called “the Harrison Ford look.” They both seemed to have declared themselves members of that class with a vengeance.
Gregor walked out of the elevator and across the reception room floor. Michael Doherty stood up and held out his hand.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Father Michael Doherty.”
“You call yourself Father,” Gregor said.
“I’ve never really understood the men who don’t,” Doherty answered. “You do all that work to get through the seminary, all that work to get ordained. Well, maybe that’s because I came to it late. I think we’d better go into the lounge, if you don’t mind. I could use a beer and we could both use a place where Edith can’t eavesdrop.”
“Is there such a place?”
“Several. But don’t count on the rooms. I think they’re bugged.” Doherty walked toward the reception desk, toward the left of which was a frosted glass door. “It’s right through here,” he said. “It’s very nice, really, and I almost never get a chance for a beer and a talk away from work anymore. Come along with me.”
Gregor came along with him, a little apprehensive that what he was going to find behind the frosted glass was a hoked-up replica of an Irish saloon or a New York City Irish neighborhood bar. He found instead a plain place with a large fireplace in it, too many scarred wooden tables, and a scattering of the same St. Patrick’s Day decorations that had infested the rest of Maryville. Gregor was getting so used to those, he hardly noticed them. There was a candle in the shape of a leprechaun on their table and a tiny basket full of silk shamrocks. Gregor pushed them out of the way as soon as he sat down and asked the waitress who seemed to be hovering just over his head for a glass of red wine. Father Doherty asked not simply for a beer, but for a St. Pauli Girl. Gregor thought about what Jack O’Brien had said, about Father Doherty and Doherty Lumber.
The waitress brought their drinks, smiled at Gregor and told Michael Doherty to have a good day, and disappeared in haste. Doherty watched her go and said, “It’s one of the great advantages of being a Catholic priest in a town like this. The service is always outstanding. Of course, if you don’t watch yourself, you could end up thinking you were one step better than God.”
Gregor shook his head. “According to the Cardinal, that’s not really true. According to the Cardinal, there’s been more than a little trouble on the religious front up here in the last few years.”
“If you mean garden-variety anti-Catholicism, there’s been some,” Doherty admitted, “but not in town. You get that mostly from the region around us, the small farming communities with heavy enrollments in scattershot fundamentalist sects. And I do mean scattershot. This is not the Southern Baptist Convention we’re talking about here. This is single churches with no connections to any organized denomination, run by pastors who’ve ordained themselves because that’s the best way they can think of to make a little bit better living than they could have doing factory work in Colchester. Their parishioners are poor and scared and undereducated and probably on the whole not very bright, and they have been known to get both nasty and violent—but on the whole I don’t worry about them. Quite frankly, on the whole I think they’re sad but harmless.”
Gregor took a sip of wine. “Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, “do you think the rest of the Catholics in Maryville would agree with you? What about the rest of the priests? What about Father—is it Fitzsimmons?”
“Barry Fitzsimmons at Iggy Loy?” Doherty grinned. “Let’s just say if he held any other opinion on this one, I would have heard about it. Everybody would have heard about it. That’s what Barry’s like.”
“And the rest?”
Doherty took a long draft of beer and poured some more from the bottle into his glass. “There are two more,” he said, “and we all see each other fairly regularly. I haven’t heard anything about any anti-Catholic activity of any kind, serious or not, from any of them. Why? Did you have a reason for thinking there would be?”
Gregor thought of the letters the Cardinal had received and the letter—as well as the snake—that had been delivered to Reverend Mother this morning. He said, “There’s a young girl dead and she was training to join a religious order. There’s a man dead, too, and he was found in that religious order’s utility room. Those two things seem to me to be enough reason to at least consider the possibility that what we have here is some kind of antireligious mania.”
“I suppose they are,” Doherty said. “All I can tell you is, I haven’t seen anything of the kind. To tell you the truth, it’s been quiet on every front I can think of over the last few months. I work down in a parish called St. Andrew’s—”
“I know about St. Andrew’s,” Gregor told him. “Sister Scholastica was explaining it to me. Poor parish, mostly Hispanic immigrant population. Lots of programs, literacy classes, and a clinic.”
“That’s right. Also citizenship classes and, believe it or not, a parish school. Don’t ask me how we keep it running, because I don’t know.
Bless those nuns. From time to time we get some know-nothing activity, anti-immigrant, antiforeigner stuff, but not recently. Recently, even the dope sales have been down.”
“Hmm,” Gregor said.
Doherty shifted a little in his chair. The lights in the lounge were so dim, and the windows so carefully tinted, it felt like the middle of the night instead of the middle of the afternoon. Doherty coughed into the side of his fist and said, “Mr. Demarkian, I came here because—no, let me put it another way. I know, because I read my local newspaper and because I spend a good deal of my time talking to Glinda Daniels, who’s been a friend of mine for years, anyway, I know all about the people who have come forward to say they saw Brigit Ann Reilly on the day she died. I know that most of them are fantasizing. I know that, from your perspective, reports of that kind are probably less than worthless, but I really did have to come—”
“You mean you saw Brigit Ann Reilly too?” Gregor wanted to add that if Father Doherty said he’d seen her, Gregor would believe he’d seen her. Father Doherty was a believable man.
Father Doherty was shaking his head. “Not exactly,” he told Gregor. “Hear me out. St. Andrew’s parish is down near the river. All the really bad parts of town are. On the day of the flood, I got worried early. I started packing us up well before noon. I didn’t want to take any chances. We have a lot of old people in our parish. You know how it is. The young men come here and work until they can bring their parents over and then their brothers and sisters and then their aunts and uncles and then their grandparents. The Irish did it and the Armenians did it and I suppose other people than these will do it in the future. You end up with a lot of old people being supported by fewer younger ones and everybody living in a small space, and the old people aren’t like the people here who live to be old. They’re feeble and they’re sick. That makes them hard to move. So, around about eleven thirty or so, when the rain was coming down in torrents, I made a few phone calls and got ready to evacuate. I got a bunch of the boys together and Sister Gabriel—she’s a nurse. She’s between assignments and the Motherhouse loans her out to me for the clinic—anyway, I got us all together, told Barry Fitzsimmons to get ready for us in the auditorium at Iggy Loy, and sent the boys out to search the apartments in the buildings around us and make sure we didn’t forget anyone. Then I had to wait for a phone call, so I stayed in my office, just sort of standing there, and that was when I saw the nun.”
“Nun?”
Michael Doherty took a deep breath. “Postulant. Whatever. I recognized the dress. She came down Beckner Street, straight at me as if she were headed for the church, and she made me very nervous. I mean, what was she doing down there, in that weather? What could she be doing? So I left my office and went out to intercept her. I got to the front door of the church and she was gone, except that I thought I saw a piece of black cloth disappearing through the door of Number Thirty-seven.”
“I see,” Gregor said slowly. “And you think this figure in black may have been Brigit Ann Reilly.”
“No,” Father Doherty said.
“What?” Gregor asked him.
Doherty took a long draft on his beer and slammed the glass onto the table in front of him. “I’m away on most program nights, visiting the prison. There are half a dozen postulants who volunteer in the programs at St. Andrew’s that I’ve never seen. Brigit Ann Reilly was something else again. Brigit Ann Reilly didn’t volunteer in the literacy program last month. She worked on my liturgical committee. She would have been on my liturgical committee this month, too, because she was good at it, except that she developed a violent crush on me and I had to cool it off. I knew Brigit Ann Reilly very well. And let me tell you, Mr. Demarkian, whoever that postulant was, walking down Beckner Street just after eleven thirty on the morning Brigit Ann Reilly died, it wasn’t Brigit Ann Reilly.”
Part Three
One
[1]
IF EDITH HAD BEEN a different kind of woman, Gregor Demarkian would have gone back to his room by crossing in front of the reception desk and taking the elevator. If he had, he would have been handed the messages waiting for him in his box. One of those messages was from Sister Mary Scholastica. It asked him to come to the convent and gave him a sketch of what the schedule was like there. In spite of the relatively relaxed atmosphere at the Motherhouse in these days following Vatican II, there was a religious schedule there and it did have to be followed. The other messages were mostly from people whose names he wouldn’t have recognized. Since the Cardinal’s press conference—why the Cardinal always had to hold a press conference, no matter what, was beyond Gregor’s power to understand—the full force of Maryville’s fantasies of conspiracy and violence had been turned in his direction. The St. Mary’s Inn was the only decent place to stay in town. If you wanted something else and weren’t interested in drunks or squalor, you had to go out to the Ramada Inn on the other side of the highway. It had taken no time at all for Maryville’s most determined conspiracy theorists to find out where Gregor was staying.
Because Edith was the kind of woman she was and because Gregor couldn’t stand the idea of being screeched at one more time, however, he took the back stairs both going back up and coming back down, avoiding reception altogether. One of the things the Bureau had taught him was to find secondary exits immediately. He had noticed the fire door at the back of the hall on his room floor when he had first been brought upstairs by Edith and the fire door at the end of the hall leading to the downstairs men’s room when he’d been saying good-bye to Father Doherty. Fire doors almost always meant stairs. Gregor was always surprised with what had stayed with him. “Always find a secondary exit” was a rule for a field agent, and he hadn’t been a field agent for ten years before his retirement. “Always organize your complaints on paper” was a rule for administrators, and he had forgotten how to carry out that one on the day he handed in his resignation.
After he left Father Doherty, he ran up to his room, grabbed the heavy brown leather jacket Lida Arkmajian had given him for his birthday, and ran down again. Then he left the St. Mary’s Inn and started heading even farther down the slope of Delaney Street. Eventually he wanted to head up and back to the Motherhouse, but not yet. All he needed to do up there was to check his suppositions. Right now he wanted to go to the library, where he might actually find out something new.
It wasn’t a very long walk. In fact, in Gregor’s estimation, the entire stretch from the Motherhouse gate to the library’s main doors was barely twelve full city blocks. It was a short enough distance to travel, and it made the “sightings” a little more forgivable. There was something eerie about a girl disappearing along a walk as short as that and showing up dead. It wasn’t a deserted walk, either. Gregor tried to think of Brigit walking—staggering, really—anywhere on Delaney Street after she had been poisoned, close to the end. He couldn’t do it. Even in the flood, somebody would have been around to see her. Delaney Street was lined with public buildings and small stores with apartments above them. Glinda Daniels had just been closing up the library when she found the body. Surely somebody would have been around on the street in the half hour or so before that, when Brigit must have been on her way to the storeroom, by one means or another. No, either Brigit Ann Reilly walked to her place of dying on a road other than this one, or she was brought there in a vehicle and dumped. Gregor was a little shocked to realize that the problem he was considering now was essentially the same one he had been considering earlier this afternoon, when he had been talking to Pete Donovan about the death of Don Bollander. In each case, he had a body dumped someplace where, on reflection, it couldn’t be. With Bollander, that had been all too obvious. With Brigit Ann Reilly, it hadn’t even been considered, because there had been too much else to think about. The snakes, the flood—Gregor was nearly at the library doors now and he shuddered. Where was the storeroom door? If it was anywhere in sight of these doors he was headed for now, getting Brigit Ann Reilly through it, conscious or unconsc
ious, would have been damn near impossible. If it was around the back—he would have to go around the back.
He stepped up to the main doors and let them slide open in front of him, gliding smoothly in their tracks. He watched with his mind half on something else as the smoked glass gave way to a typical small-town scene, with children sitting in a ring around a reader in the children’s section and two teenagers fumbling with the card catalog and a middle-aged woman with a stack of romance novels checking out at the desk. The Norman Rockwell picture was entrancing, and for a moment it obscured what else was going on in the Maryville Public Library. Gregor Demarkian was not one of those people who believed that Norman Rockwell had painted a false-faced, cotton candy, never-existing world. He had known dozens of Norman Rockwell families and Norman Rockwell towns in his career. This just didn’t happen to be one of either.
The disturbance was being caused by a very small woman with bright red hair. When the main doors had opened for Gregor, she had been momentarily silent. By the time he stepped inside, she was being silent no longer. She was standing at the check-out desk in a bright green toggle-fronted cashmere car coat, pounding her list against the desk’s blond wood. Since every one of her fingers had rings on them, every pound she made gave off metallic echoes.
“I don’t care where she is or what she’s doing,” she was shouting, “I want to talk to that little bitch right now!”
It should have ended right there, because the girl behind the check-out desk was being stubborn. Gregor could see the lines of mulishness in her young, plain face and a secret satisfaction. In some way Gregor couldn’t understand yet, these roles were being reversed. In most encounters between these two, it was the red-haired woman who would be winning. The girl at the desk crossed her arms over her chest and said,
